Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical at the Aldwych Theatre about the Profumo affair
has delightful tunes and an unexpected dash of mischief, says Charles
Spencer

Since he parted company with Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals have hardly been famous for their wit. They have been yearningly romantic, certainly, and often darkly gothic, but in the immortal words of Cilla Black, there haven’t been a lorra laffs.

So his new musical about the Profumo affair comes as a delightful surprise.

Yes, it is indignant at times, suggesting that Stephen Ward was set up as a “human sacrifice” when the scandal put the skids under Macmillan’s Government, and it is a show that may well play a part in the current campaign to quash the society osteopath’s trumped up conviction for living on immoral earnings.

But there is also a sense of mischief about the piece, that finds this sometimes po-faced composer coming up with numbers in a rich variety of styles, so that the familiar yearning anthems are interspersed with songs of wit and fun. Several of the tunes are instantly catchy too.

The best of these is You’ve Never Had It So Good, in which Christopher Hampton and Don Black – jointly responsible for the show’s book and lyrics – conflate Harold Macmillan’s famous line about the nation’s prosperity with Private Eye’s wicked take on it when the Profumo affair erupted: You’ve Never Had It So Often.

This is sung during an upper class orgy in Mayfair, complete with a leather-masked slave in a pinny and a whip-wielding dominatrix.

But there’s also a delightful hula-hoop number at Murray’s Club in Soho where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies worked as show girls; engaging reggae to conjure the story’s West Indian connections, and a perky pastiche of Sixties pop called 1963 with Beatles-like ‘yeah, yeahs’.

Richard Eyre’s fluent production tells the story of Ward’s downfall with a bracing mixture of humour and indignation. The show begins with a sung prologue in which the osteopath is discovered as a waxwork in the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, with Hitler on one side of him and the acid bath murderer on the other.

Translucent drapes and projections conjure a wide variety of locations with film-like ease, from Cliveden to Venice and, finally, the notorious trial at the Old Bailey.

The show sharply captures the mood and atmosphere of the early Sixties, in which formality, snobbery and deference were giving way to greater freedom.

Alexander Hanson is superb as Ward – charming, witty and handsome, but with a disconcerting hint of something less wholesome beneath. He sings superbly, too. Charlotte Spencer touchingly captures the initial gaucheness and vulnerability of Christine Keeler while Charlotte Blackledge plays Mandy Rice-Davies with a winning spark. Anthony Calf offers a fine double as both Lord Astor and the prosecuting counsel in the climatic trial who denounced Ward as a “monster of depravity”. And Joanna Riding is genuinely moving as Profumo’s betrayed wife, the actress Valerie Hobson; she gets maximum value from a lovely song called I’m Hopeless When it Comes to You.

My hunch is that those who like Lloyd Webber best when he’s doomy-gloomy won’t warm to this show, but that those who have previously found him overwrought will find this sharp, funny – and, at times, genuinely touching – musical highly enjoyable.